SCIENTISTS are building a large survey telescope with a wide field and high resolution in Northwest China’s Qinghai Province. The telescope will be able to survey the entire sky from the Northern Hemisphere.

Construction of the Wide Field Survey Telescope (WFST), an optical instrument measuring 2.5 meters in diameter, has already started in Lenghu Town, which has an average altitude of approximately 4,200 meters. The town is known as China’s “Mars Camp” due to its eerily eroded desert landscape that resembles the surface of the red planet.

With an investment of 200 million yuan (US$31 million), the telescope project was launched in 2017 by several research institutions including the University of Science and Technology of China and the Purple Mountain Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Once completed, it will be able to survey the whole northern sky once every three nights.

“The WFST will become the most powerful sky survey telescope in the Northern Hemisphere,” said Kong Xu, the project’s chief designer and a professor at the University of Science and Technology of China, at the project launch ceremony Tuesday.

With the telescope, scientists are expected to make breakthroughs in several fields including time-domain astronomy, celestial body searches in the outer solar system, and Milky Way structure studies, said Kong.

In another development, a China-made meteorological satellite for dawn-dusk orbits has passed a factory review in Shanghai, one step closer to launching it into space, its developer said Monday.

The satellite is called Fengyun-3E (FY-3E) and was designed and built by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology, affiliated with the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. It will be the world’s first meteorological satellite in a dawn-dusk orbit.

A dawn-dusk orbit is a sun-synchronous orbit where the satellite tracks but never moves into the Earth’s shadow. Since the satellite is close to the shadow, the part of Earth directly above it is always at sunset or sunrise, hence the name “dawn-dusk orbit.”

(Xinhua)